{"quotes":[{"text":"It is wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a degree as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?","author":"Victor Hugo","tags":["capital-punishment","divine-law","law"],"id":29372,"author_id":"Victor+Hugo"},{"text":"Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.","author":"George Bernard Shaw","tags":["capital-punishment","crime","death","justice","punishment"],"id":37396,"author_id":"George+Bernard+Shaw"},{"text":"For each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not diehe does not die a death of shame on a day of dark disgracenor have a noose about his neck, nor a cloth upon his facenor drop feet foremost through the floor into an empty spaceHe does not sit with silent men who watch him night and dayWho watch him when he tries to weep and when he tries to prayWho watch him lest himself should rob the prison of its prey.","author":"Oscar Wilde","tags":["capital-punishment","murder","prisoners"],"id":64983,"author_id":"Oscar+Wilde"},{"text":"Agnes: 'I have a question for you, speaking of truth. You say God speaks the truth.' Tóti: 'Yes.' Agnes: 'And God said: 'Thou shalt not kill.'Tóti: 'Yes. Tóti said carefully.' Agnes: 'Then Blondal and the rest are going against God. They're hypocrites. They say they are carrying out God's law but they are only doing the will of men.","author":"Hannah Kent","tags":["capital-punishment","hypocrisy","hypocrites"],"id":67101,"author_id":"Hannah+Kent"},{"text":"The serial murderer often seeks the very form of capital punishment that is being held over his head as a deterrent.","author":"Joel Norris","tags":["capital-punishment","crime","murder","serial-killer"],"id":88916,"author_id":"Joel+Norris"},{"text":"[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of.","author":"Helen Prejean","tags":["an-eye-for-an-eye","capital-punishment","criminal-justice","criminal-justice-system","death-penalty","death-row","executions","government","human-rights","inalienable-rights","law","right-to-life","right-to-live","torture"],"id":99934,"author_id":"Helen+Prejean"},{"text":"In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["1998","capital-punishment","capital-punishment-in-the-us","social-class","united-states"],"id":126601,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.","author":"Nancy Reagan","tags":["capital-punishment","death","dumb"],"id":157700,"author_id":"Nancy+Reagan"},{"text":"But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!","author":"Fyodor Dostoyevsky","tags":["capital-punishment","death-and-dying","dostoyevsky","guillotine","terror"],"id":162469,"author_id":"Fyodor+Dostoyevsky"},{"text":"I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera.Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the 'forests of symbols.'(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.).","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["adolescence","baudelaire","capital-punishment","childhood","confusion","death","death-penalty","infantile","maturity","motor-vehicle-accident","real","reality","sign","signification","surreal","symbolism"],"id":167836,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}